This past week, 44 Republican Congressmen signed a letter demanding that the Secretary of Defense halt plans to remove a Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetery. The removal of the monument will take place before the end of the year and is the second tallest monument in the cemetery.
Given the politics of the past few years, you may have wondered how the Republican Party came to embrace the memory of the Confederacy. Republican-controlled state legislators have passed laws barring the removal of Confederate monuments. The Confederate flag was pervasive during campaign events for Donald Trump in 2016. Republican candidates for public office such, as Cory Stewart (born and raised in Minnesota), have based their campaigns largely around the defense of Confederate symbols.
Why and how did we get here?
To help answer some of these questions I am joined by Dr. Tim Galsworthy, who is a Lecturer in History & Military History at Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Republican House Divided: Civil War Memory, Civil Rights, and the Transformation of the GOP (University of South Carolina Press).
For more on this subject, check out his op-ed in The Washington Post and blog post at Muster: The Blog of the Journal of the Civil War Era.
How Did the "Party of Lincoln" Become the Champions of the Confederacy?